Thursday, January 1, 2015

The shibbolethic (is that a word? It should be!) pronunciation of quinoa has puzzled me for some time. How does a word that came to English from Spanish end up being pronounced as though it were French? I would expect it to be spelled quinois based on the English pronunciation alone. I did some research and found that I am not the only person perplexed by this issue. Others have asked the question in various on-line forums. Is there a satisfactory answer?

Quinoa came to English from Quechua via Spanish. Quechua is a native language family of South America, with most speakers living in the Andes. The OED says that Quechua was the name of a specific group of people who spoke the language, and the word came to refer to the language itself. The name of the native group is said, by several sources, to mean "people who live in a temperate valley" (which is where, I think, one would want to live if one were in the Andes hundreds of years ago).

The Quechua word for "quinoa" is kínuwa "KEEN-u-wah". You can see where the "-wah" pronunciation arose. The central u sound was eventually elided in English, and the result was pronounced "KEEN-wah". However, in America, we like to stress the final syllable of French and French-like words (ballet, pâté, gourmet), so for some speakers here it became "keen-WAH". In the UK most speakers keep the accent on the first syllable (as they also do with ballet, pâté, and gourmet) and so they stuck with "KEEN-wah" for the most part.

That explains the pronunciation, but what about the spelling? The earliest Spanish spelling was quinua ("keen-OOH-ah"), but a contemporary form was quínoa ("KEEN-oh-ah"). While the former spelling hung around in English for some time, after turning up in the late 16th century, quinoa appeared by the late 18th century and eventually became the preferred spelling.

If you want people to think you know what you're talking about pronounce it "KEEN-wah" or "keen-WAH". If you don't care, good for you! Having knowledge of Spanish and Spanish pronunciation, I always wanted to pronounce it "keen-OH-ah", but now that I've determined whence the "-wah" pronunciation came, I may eventually train myself to say it that way, though I still find myself, on seeing the word in print, saying "keen-OH-ah".

Jerky. Photo credit Larry Jacobsen

Quechua gave other words to English. Jerky, as in beef jerky, comes from Quechua charki "dried, salted meat." It entered English via Spanish and first turns up in the written record in the late 19th century.

Puma "mountain lion" is another word borrowed from Quechua, and it was even used to name the genus of which the mountain lion, Puma concolor, is a member. The word made it, in the same form as in English (17th c.), into French (17th c.), Italian (18th c.), and even German (18th c.), via Spanish.

The one word that seems it should have come from Quechua to English, potato (because the tuber originated in the Andes), did not, but it instead came from a native Caribbean language. In that language, Taino, batata was the word for the indigenous sweet potato. English adopted that tuber, along with the Taino word for it, turning it into potato, in the mid-16th century. John Ayto, in his Dictionary of Word Origins (1990), tells us that the potato mentioned in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor was, in fact, the sweet potato (and it was considered an aphrodisiac!). It wasn't until the end of the 16th century that the word potato settled upon Solanum tuberosum, what we know today as the potato. However, the Quechua word for "potato", papa, did enter Spanish and it became the standard name for the potato in the Spanish-speaking world. In mainland Spain, though, patata took over in the late 19th century.

Before I close, there is that word shibboleth. What a lovely word—rather unusual looking and odd sounding among other English words. It is, as you may know, from Hebrew, and it entered English from the Bible. It was a word used by the Gileadites to detect their enemies, the Ephraimites, because the Ephraimites could not pronounce it properly. Shibboleth came to mean, in English, any word that had an unusual pronunciation that outsiders did not know. Such words were used to identify and exclude the outsiders. Shibboleth came to English in the 14th century. More recently it has come to mean any dated or outmoded practice or belief that is still held.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Allergy season in the Northern Hemisphere has been upon us for some time (though one member of the Take Our Word For It household is allergic to everything and sneezes year-round). Seeing antihistamines around every corner in the local stores, touting their effects against allergies, made me wonder about the word allergy. Whence does it derive? I was rather surprised to find that it was coined by a German scientist (C. E. von Pirquet) in 1906! He formed it from the Greek words allos "other, different" and ergon "work, activity" suggesting "different activity" or "changed activity." The OED says that the original meaning was "altered immunological reactivity to a foreign antigen following previous exposure to it." This meaning quickly evolved to "hypersensitivity that results in some sort of disorder (such as hayfever)," and then "intolerance of or adverse reaction to a specific substance, especially a food."﻿

We see Greek allos in other English words. There is ﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿
allosaurus "other lizard," named because its vertebrae were different from those of other dinosaurs found to date. Allegory comes from Greek allos + agoros "speak" (derived from the "open public space" sense), giving us the etymological meaning "to say something other than what one seems to be saying." One can see how that came to mean "the use of symbols in a story, picture, etc., to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one," as the OED defines it today.Greek allos goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root *al- "beyond, other." We can just make it out in English else, which dates from Old English. It's not quite as easy to see in other. That derives from a variant form of *al-, *an-, plus a suffix that meant "two," giving us anthara- with the sense "other of two." It's a bit easier to see other in that. *Al- is also the root of Latin ultra "beyond." Relatives of ultra include ulterior (etymologically meaning "further beyond") and ultimate ("the furthest").

The "other of two" derivation shows up again in alter, which English borrowed from Latin alter. John Ayto* says the etymological sense of alter is "more other" with an implied alternation between two. Altercation "argument (with another)" comes from the same source, via Latin altercari. Alternate has the etymological sense "every other" and derives from Latin alter + -nus, an adjectival suffix. Altruisim is the odd man out. While it comes ultimately from Latin alter, it came to English from French altruisme and was coined from French autrui "somebody else, other." The "l" from Latin alter was inserted in place of the u in a kind of hypercorrection with the knowledge of alter as the ancestor. The word was first used by Auguste Comte, the founder of the field of sociology, in 1852.
﻿

There is also an "other of more than two" sense that derives from *al-. We see this in English alien, etymologically "of or belonging to others (persons or places)." In researching this word, I learned, again from John Ayto (love that guy!), that there was a variant form, alient, but it died out. He likens it to ancient, pageant, and tyrant, which were previously ancien, pagean, and tyran until that same final t was added in the 15th century. This was apparently a learned alteration, referring back to Latin participial forms. Alias ("other (name)") is another in this *al- subfamily, as is alibi. The latter arose from the locative form of Latin alius "other" with the meaning "elsewhere" ("other place"), so that an alibi is etymologically one's explanation of being "elsewhere" when a crime occurred.Going back to the simpler "other" meaning of *al-, we find adultery. This may be unexpected, but it is thought to derive from the Latin phrase ad alterum "(approaching) another (unlawfully)," where ad means "to, toward". Latin adulterare also had the broader sense "defile, pollute" which carried into English as adulterate.Additional "other of two" words are parallel and parallax. Parallel means, in an etymological sense, "beside each other," with parallel being formed from para- "beside" and allelon "each other," which comes from that Greek term we've already encountered, allos. The OED defines parallaxas "difference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points." Parallaxwas formed from Greek para- + allasein"to change, exchange" from the sense "alternate" that arose from allos.There are four other Proto-Indo-European roots known as *al- with different meanings, so do not assume all words beginning with *al- are related to the *al- discussed at length here. The second *al- (known as *al-2) has the etymological meaning of "to wander," and *al-3 means "to grow, nourish." *Al-4 is "to grind, mill" and *al-5 is "all." None is as prolific a supplier of English words as our dear old *al- (known as *al-1).This week's link of interest is James Somers' piece on the beautiful language of old dictionaries: You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary.*See Take Our Word For It's bibliography.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

When we once entertained the notion of writing a short book of Ren Faire (short for Renaissance Faire) terms, Mommy, What's a Codpiece? was the title we considered. There are several words, bandied about at such fairs, whose etymology we have often wondered about. Since it is now the season of Ren Faires, it is the perfect time to analyze some of those words.

Codpiece, of course, is the first to come to mind. Most of us know what it is - the OED Online defines it as

A bagged appendage to the front of close fitting hose or breeches worn by men of the 15th to 17th c.: often conspicuous or ornamented.

Codpiece-Antonio Navagero (1565), from Wikipedia

Men of the period wore hose or leggings, and a longish coat or jacket over those. The hose were not joined at the crotch, so the genitals could be exposed, but the naughty bits were, in the beginning, covered by the length of the jacket (doublet). However, fashion tastes brought about a rise in the hemline of the doublet. Once it started approaching the tops of the thighs, men risked exposing their genitals as they mounted and dismounted their horses and during other activities. Thus the codpiece was born. It was originally a simple triangle of cloth laced to the gap in the hose, but with time it grew larger and more ornate, and it even acquired padding. As tastes changed, the codpiece eventually went out of fashion, but it can still be seen today in period clothing, and also among certain groups such as heavy metal rockers and superheroes (certain versions of Batman in film, for example).

The word codpiece is, etymologically, "a piece for the scrotum or testicles," as cod is the Old English word for "testicle" by transference from its previous meaning, "scrotum." The "scrotum" meaning arose from the word's earlier, broader sense of "pouch." Codpiece dates from the late 15th century, while cod turns up in the written record around 1000. One could say that a codpiece is a "piece for the pouch"!

Bodice-http://www.lady-faire.com/bodices.html

Now let us give womenswear some attention. Why is the bodice so named? You may be surprised to learn that it is a doublet (having the same etymological roots) of the word bodies. The term bodice was originally a pair of bodies, as this article of clothing came in two pieces that were joined and laced up the front and back. The phrase was truncated to bodies and then the spelling altered to bodice. The word bodice was treated as a plural (like dice and mice) for quite some time. The plural of the word body was used because this particular garment clothed the body (or trunk), as distinct from the arms, legs and head. The term dates from the mid-16th century.

The word doublet was mentioned in the discussion of codpiece above (and again in the discussion of bodice, but that is a different doublet). Why was the men's jacket of the Renaissance called a doublet? English borrowed it from French (same spelling) in the early 14th century, and the French had so named it because it was made of fabric that was doubled or folded and quilted. The -et suffix of doublet makes it a diminutive of double.

Farthingale. http://bit.ly/1js2gq1

Back to women's clothing - what is a farthingale? It is a hooped petticoat, the hoops often being made of whalebone. The hoops lifted a woman's skirts away from the body, in a bell shape. Where did its name come from? A person? A place? None of the above. In fact, it derives ultimately from Spanish verdugado, from verdugo "rod, stick," referring to the whalebone or cane sticks/rods used. It came to English in the mid-16th century via the French form, verdugale.

If you've ever read Stellar and Yeatman's 1066 and All That, a humorous look at British history, you may recall that everyone seemed to die from eating a surfeit of something. Was a surfeit a bowl, or a plate? Or a particular method of food preparation? No, it was an "excessive consumption of food or drink" per the OED. That meaning is considered obsolete now, but it was more common during the Renaissance. It also refers to an excessive quantity of anything. It derives ultimately from French sur- which is equivalent to Latin super- + faire "to do, act," with the combined meaning "do something excessively." The association with food and drink appears to have been attached to the word when it came to English in the late 14th century.

Privies - http://www.dmrenfaire.com/

Everyone who has attended a Ren Faire knows that the toilets are referred to as privies. You may have guessed that privy is in some way related to private, and if so you guessed correctly. The privy was a private place. Both private and privy derive ultimately from Latin privus "individual". Something that was private was reserved for an individual or a select few, and a privy was a private area reserved for the members of a family or household to relieve themselves.

What about deprive and privation, you may ask? These are also related, but they took a different route from Latin to English. While private and privy came from the past participle of privare, privatus, deprive and privation came directly from privare. Privare originally meant "isolate," but its meaning evolved from "isolate" (and you can see how that derived from the "individual" meaning of its parent, privus) to that which can come from isolation, deprivation, and that is whence privation and deprive came to English. Yet another priv- word, privelege, means, etymologically, "law regarding the individual," where the -lege element derives from Latin lex "law".

Sunday, April 20, 2014

The latest blog entry is a bit late because I was traveling to, attending, and returning from a funeral, and thereafter I was caring for an ill (now fully recovered) cat. My travels and care-giving experiences turned up quite a few words that piqued (not "peaked"!) my curiosity. Some of these words are connected, while others are not. This will, then, be an etymological mesclun salad. Mesclun is defined by the OED as "young leaves and shoots of a variety of wild plants, used to make a salad." The term has also come to refer to a salad of mixed young leaves that are not necessarily wild. Mesclun came to English from French, and it derives from Latin mescere "to mix." The ultimate source is Proto-Indo-European meik- "mix" which gave us words like meddle, medley, mélange, miscellaneous (and miscellany), mix, mixture, and even mustang and promiscuous.

After the funeral, I wondered about the origins of funerary words. Funeral came to English via French from Latin funus "funeral, corpse" but beyond that very little is known about the word. However, some conjecture that it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root dheu- "to rise in a cloud" as do dust, vapor and smoke, among other things. The connection here would be cremation of the dead and the resulting rising smoke and ashes. That would make funus and fumus (Latin for "smoke") cognates.

There were other rituals observed around the funeral. The evening before the funeral a gathering at the funeral home called "visitation" occurred. This appears to be the twenty-first century version of a wake. A wake was traditionally the time between death and burial when the family of the deceased sat with and watched over the body. This meaning of wake preserves an older sense of the word, which was "be watchful" and that further morphed into "guard." Thus, during a traditional wake, the body was watched and guarded until burial. Burial occurred much more quickly in earlier times, before undertakers mastered their art of preserving the body so that the time to burial could be extended. The English word watch comes from the same source a wake.

Smoke http://bit.ly/1mrUOSy

In the case of the funeral I attended, the deceased was cremated some time after the visitation and funeral. Cremate was borrowed from Latin cremare "to burn." Calvert Watkins (see the TOWFI bibliography) ties the Latin word to the Proto-Indo-European root ker- "heat, fire." This would mean that hearth, carbon, and cremate are all related (with metathesis of the e and r in ker- for cremate). Watkins also thinks that ceramic may derive from the same root.

One of two cats in the TOWFI household has idiopathic tachycardia (idiopathic = Greek idio- "personal" and Greek -pathic "relating to a disease," and idiopathic has the meaning "disease arising by itself" (literally "from the person") though now it also means "of unknown etiology") (tachycardia = Greek tachy- "swift" and Greek -cardia "heart" and means "rapid heart rate"). This condition requires him to take medication (the beta blocker atenolol) twice a day. Thus, we had to board the cats at our veterinarian's office while we were away, because the cats are very shy and it would be impossible for our normal cat sitter to administer a pill, not to mention that it would be an inconvenience having to do so twice a day. Anyhow, I mention the boarding for two reasons: to add another etymological discussion to our mesclun salad, and to give a possible reason for the non-tachycardic cat's subsequent illness.

Smorgasbord from http://bit.ly/1lqokso

First comes the etymology of board in this sense. The phrase was originally room and board, which meant one got a room and meals. The meal sense of board arose metaphorically from the "table" meaning of the word (this sense is also seen in the bord element of Swedish smorgasbord). Eventually the room and portion was dropped and board came to have the meaning of the entire phrase. It was then turned into a verb meaning "to provide [room and] board."

The second reason I mentioned board above was to provide a segue into the next discussion. You see, our until-then healthy cat got sick a day after returning from boarding, so we wondered if he picked up the feline equivalent of a norovirus while housed in proximity to other cats. He was vomiting and anorexic (meaning he did not want to eat, from Greek elements meaning "lack of desire [for food]). He had vomited all night and when that continued until midday, the vet asked that he be brought in. Ultimately he was diagnosed with gastritis of unknown cause, and he has since fully recovered. However, while shuttling him back and forth to the vet's office and discussing his prolific vomiting with the doctor, I did wonder about words related to vomit. Luckily I was not eating during most of these mental musings.

From http://bit.ly/1jpVaUD

Vomit and emesis are related, perhaps surprisingly, both deriving from the Proto-Indo-European root wem- "vomit." There is also an English word wamble "feel queasy" that derives from the same root but came to English via a Germanic source, while the others came via Latin and Greek, respectively. Then there is the word barf, which the OED considers to be chiefly American. No one is sure, but the prevailing thought is that the word is echoic. Retch goes all the way back to Old English. An alternative form is reach. It originally meant "spit, clear the throat." I must also include chunder in this discussion, of course. We dealt with it a while back in TOWFI. Here is an excerpt:

As for chunder, that's a great Aussie word, indeed. The OED has no idea about its etymology, but Eric Partridge suggests derivation from the English dialectical chounter "mutter, murmur, grumble", supposedly echoic in derivation. However, he mentions another etymologist's¹ proposed derivations: an abbreviation of watch under ("look out below"), a call that seasick sailors could have made to their mates below; or rhyming slang, from Chunder Loo meaning "spew," Chunder Loo of Akim Foo being a cartoon character in ads for Cobra boot polish, carried in the Sydney Bulletin starting in 1909. Michael Quinion notes that Barry Humphries (known today as Dame Edna) popularized the term chunder in his comic strip about Australians in London in Private Eye magazine. The strip was called Barry McKenzie.

¹That etymologist is G.A. Wilkes, in his A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms of 1978.

While we are on the subject, did you know that butyric acid is what gives vomit its characteristic smell? Butyric comes from Latin butyrum "butter" because butyric acid was first isolated from butter.

Image from http://bit.ly/1rbjtsp (interesting article)

Now that we have broached the subject of chemicals that cause distinctive smells, how about geosmin? I learned recently that this is the chemical that gives beets their "earthy" taste. It is also a component of the familiar smell of rain after a dry spell, or of freshly disturbed soil. Geosmin means, etymologically, "earth smell," formed from the Greek elements geo- "earth" and -osmo "smell." This chemical is released when bacteria of the genus Streptomyces die. These bacteria are found in soil and decaying vegetation. If geosmin is only a component of the smell that occurs when rain falls on dry ground, what is the smell itself? It is called petrichor, from Greek petrus "rock" and ichor "the ethereal fluid that flows in the veins of the gods." The word was coined and first published in 1964 by Australian mineralogists Isabel J. Bear and R.G. Thomas in the journal Nature. These scientists determined that the smell comes primarily from an oil produced by some plants in dry conditions. That oil is absorbed by surrounding rocks and clay and released by rain. (Here's a Scientific American article on the subject, by the mellifluously named Daisy Yuhas.)

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Cobb salad. I love a good Cobb salad. The salad itself is relatively easy to put together — ham, eggs, tomatoes, avocado, chicken, Roquefort cheese, and greens. It's the dressing that matters most to me, and I found a recipe I like. While searching through recipes on-line, I also found Saveur's version, and it explained why the salad is so named. It is named after its inventor, Robert H. Cobb, part-owner of the famous Brown Derby restaurants in Los Angeles. He came up with the dish in 1937 — it is said that he threw together what he could find in the kitchen for a late night dish, and a menu mainstay was born. Wikipedia gives even more detail on this, though a source is not cited:

The Hollywood Brown Derby is the purported birthplace of the Cobb Salad, which was said to have been hastily arranged from leftovers by owner Bob Cobb for showman and theater owner Sid Grauman. It was chopped fine because Grauman had just had dental work done, and couldn't chew well.

That is an entertaining, if possibly apocryphal, bit of information on the origin of the Cobb salad.

On researching the Brown Derby, I learned that there were eventually four Brown Derby restaurants in L.A.:

Brown Derby: http://bit.ly/1iREOG2

Wilshire Boulevard (the original, opened in 1926, and shaped like a derby hat), Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Los Feliz. These restaurants figured prominently in Hollywood of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Stars flocked there to eat, and star-watchers flocked there to see them. Sadly, the restaurants had all closed by the 1980s.

After researching the salad name, I began to wonder about other cobb- and cob-related words. There are several. First is the surname Cobb, which is thought to have come from the Middle English nickname or personal name Cobbe/Cobba, related to Old Norse Kobbi. All of these are thought to derive from a word that meant "lump" — lump in this sense referred to a large (round) man. This was curious, but interesting. However, it got more interesting when I looked up cob. I knew this word to refer to horses, male swans, and to (sweet) corn, but the first sense in the OED is "a great man, big man, leading man" (from as early as 1420). What could horses, swans, and corn have to do with big men or leaders?

Welsh cob: http://bit.ly/1gqO4Sa

Horses called cobs are stout, short-legged ponies. A cob is also a male swan. Further, a cob of corn is the seed head of the corn plant. Two different senses are coming through here: a short, stout horse could be thought of as round, or lump-shaped. On the other hand, a male swan is the head swan, and a cob of corn is the seed head. Both of these senses can be connected with the body part known as the head. It is often round (certainly so in humans) and it is, rather obviously, a head, and the figurative leader of the body. The OED doesn't like to make this connection between the two senses of cob ("round" and "leader"), but John Ayto does (in his Dictionary of Word Origins, 1990). It is indeed an attractive suggestion, for an obsolete English word for "top of the head" is cop. This appears to have mutated into cob in the word cobweb, so couldn't it have mutated into some of the other cob words? Cop is an old word for "spider," being short for attercop, which derives from Old English ator "poison" and coppe "head." Ayto goes on to suggest that cop/coppe (and thus cob) could very well be related to Latin caput "head." Other English words that derive from the Latin are cap (head covering) and cape (with the sense "hood," a type of head covering).

There are several other meanings of cob that include the round sense (some of these are dialectic): the stone of a fruit; a testicle; a small stack of hay; a knot of hair; a lump of coal; an apple dumpling. Then there is cobblestone, referring to the rounded shape of the stones. Cobble in that sense is a diminutive form of cob. The head sense is found in an obsolete meaning of cob: "the head of a (red) herring."

Cobbler: http://bit.ly/OLn5oI

Now, what about the other obvious cob/cobb words: cobbler (person) and cobbler (dessert)? The dessert meaning is chiefly American and dates from around 1859 in the written record. The OED does not suggest an etymology, but Robert K. Barnhart, in his Dictionary of Etymology (1995), suggests a connection with cobeler, "a wooden bowl or dish." He dates that word to 1385, but the OED does not have it (though the OED, and the on-line Middle English Dictionary, to which the OED on-line links, have cobeler as an early form of cobbler "shoe mender"). Others have suggested the dessert is so named because it consists of fruit baked with lumps of dough placed on top, taking us back to the "round" or "lump" senses. As for the person called a cobbler, or a shoe mender, no one seems to know its origin (it dates from about 1362). Cobble "to mend roughly" or "to put together roughly" is a back formation from cobbler "shoe mender" and dates from around 1496.

How about the UK expression cobblers for "nonsense"? That is apparently from rhyming slang: cobbler's awls = "balls" (testicles) or "rubbish." As I've tweeted before, Americans are not very familiar with rhyming slang, but we do use a bit. Here's that tweet:

The shorthand and somewhat cramped style of the above quotation were employed to keep the length at 140 characters or fewer, the cardinal rule of Twitter.

There are other words that start with cob-. What about cobalt? It is not related to those above. It, instead, comes from German Kobold "goblin". Early German miners named it thus because the mineral occurred with arsenic and sulfur, which often made the miners ill. Further, as an impurity, it lessened the value of the silver ore being mined. The miners attributed cobalt's presence to mischievous goblins. Several etymologies of the German word have been suggested: that it derives from kuba-walda or "ruler of the house"; that it comes from kofewalt "a spirit controlling one room"; and that it comes from German elements meaning "spirit of the pigsty." German supernatural creatures appear to have been quite specialized!

A cobra: http://bit.ly/1iRH7ch

There is another cob- word that I did not think of immediately, and when I did, I felt sure it wasn't related to the words with etymological senses of "head" and "round." Cobras are, after all, snakes that are not native to English-speaking regions (or even regions where Latinate languages were native), and surely, I thought, their name is derived from an indigenous African or Asian term. However, that is where I erred. The name cobra is short for Portuguese cobra de capello "snake with a little hood," referring, of course, to the cobra's ability to enlarge the appearance of its head by expanding its hood. Cobra here derives from Latin colubra "snake."While it is not related to the above cob- words, it is Indo-European in origin, like the other cob- words. It dates from 1817.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

We had some relatively wild weather in northern California this week. Some of you may recall that I have a B.S. in meteorology (weather, not meteors. Greeek meteoron meant "something high or lofty" and came to mean "phenomena in the sky or heavens"), and I grew up with crazy weather in Texas. When I moved to California, little did I know how much I would miss a good thunderstorm. So when I saw an interesting cloud formation outside my office window last week, I snapped a photograph and promptly posted it to my local National Weather Service's Facebook page. The cloud formation in question was mammatus. If you follow TOWFI on Twitter (where I tweet links to language-related articles of interest to TOWFI readers, and I also provide brief etymologies), you may have seen the mammatus photograph when I tweeted it to Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel, followed by a tweet (to TOWFI followers) explaining the etymology of mammatus. I'll speak a bit more about mammatus later.

However, while my tweet referenced udders, the National Weather Service, on their Facebook page, responded to my post to them with the following:

The "utter" looking clouds ... appear to be mammatus from this picture. The overall weather pattern and atmospheric stability would support this type of cloud today. Thanks for sharing.

The word in quotation marks stands out. Of course the writer meant udder. How could such a mistake be made? Utter and udder are two different words with very different meanings. British English speakers must be particularly puzzled by this. The key here is pronunciation.

In the U.S., we are what those of us here at TOWFI like to call non-tauic (this is not a technical term; it's just one we made up based on an existing technical term). To explain this, we must start with the term non-rhotic (this is, in fact, a technical term and not one that we made up). Most British English speakers are non-rhotic, that is, they do not pronounce r if it is followed by a consonant. To go with that, they have the linking r, where the ris pronounced if it is followed by a vowel (in the word roaring, British English speakers pronounce both r's, and in "far and away" the r in far is usually pronounced) . In fact, many British English speakers also insert an r between vowels where one doesn't exist, and that is called the intrusive r. An extreme example of this, for Americans, occurs with the Mike Myers character Simon, from Saturday Night Live. This character is a child who likes "to do drawRings" (see the character on YouTube). The r is inserted between draw and -ings. Canadian Mike Myers' parents were both from Liverpool, England, and this may explain his fascination with accents of the British Isles (he also did a Scottish accent occasionally on SNL; his voice for the animated character Shrek was done in a Scottish accent, as well). A less extreme example of the intrusive r would be a British English speaker calling someone named Amanda "AmandaR."

That's all well and good, eh? What about utter and udder? In America we are non-tauic, in that we often do not pronounce our t's as t's. We sometimes pronounce a t within a word as a d, or we don't pronounce it all and substitute it with a glottal stop. Mountain is a good example of a word where we substitute a glottal stop. What is a glottal stop? An example of a glottal stop is the sound made when we say "uh-oh." The dash can be said to represent the glottal stop. Many Americans say "mao-un" (or "mao-in") where the dash again represents the glottal stop. Utter, on the utter hand (sorry), is a case where the t is pronounced as a d. This is so common that it leads to some misspellings, such as in the case of the NWS Facebook post. The poster was apparently more familiar with the spelling of the word utter than that of the word udder, two different words that are pronounced exactly the same by many in the U.S. Others make the same mistake: perform a Google image search for utter and you will get a few images of cows (along with many images of otters!).

Matthew McConaughey

A brief aside regarding rhotacism: I'd like to point out that Texans are rhotic, that is, Texans pronounce their r's. In fact, they sometimes insert r's where they don't belong (my grandmother used to say "tomater" for tomato and "pillar" for pillow, and she lived her entire life in Texas). Actors trying to speak with a Texas accent very often decide to go non-rhotic. This, unfortunately, is inaccurate. There are a few dialects in the deep South of the U.S. that are non-rhotic (non-rhotic dialects also exist in New England). The Texas dialects are not among them (and Texas is not considered to be in the deep South). Texans pronounce their r's with gusto. Just listen to Matthew McConaughey in True Detective (a superb series on HBO in the U.S. and on Sky Atlantic in the U.K. - here's an interesting article on it). That is a real Texas accent (he is, after all, from Texas and appears to be quite proud of it). There is apparently now an app for teaching actors how to properly speak with specific American accents. It is called The Real Accent App: USA. The app includes a Dallas accent, and I can't wait to hear it: I'm a Dallas native!

Since this is ultimately an etymology blog, we really should look at udder and utter. Udder is an old word, turning up in Old English and Old Saxon, as well as several other Germanic languages. In Latin it was uber, and Greek and Sanskrit had cognates. The Latin form also gave us exuberant from the Latin adjective uberus meaning "fertile". The sense went from "[lactating] teats" to "fertile" to "abundant or overflowing," and then "abundant or overflowing in emotion." (Latin uber should not be confused with German über "over.")

Utter means, etymologically, "outer" and is, not surprisingly, cognate with outer. Utmost is another relative. Utter and utmost have the sense of "outermost," and the sense shifted to "going to the most outer (or utmost) point; extreme" (from the OED). Thus, an "utter fool" is the most extreme of fools. Calvert Watkins suggests that the Indo-European root here is ud- "up, out", which also gave us ersatz (via Old High German) "substitute or imitation," the sense being of putting something "out" and replacing it with something else.

And with that, I am utterly exhausted and will now retire to catch up on True Detective.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Ojibwa at Daily Kos wrote an article this week entitled, "Origins of English: Some Obsolete Words." Strangely, the author states in the article, "I have listed only the meaning of the word, not its etymology nor the date of its last recorded use." I'm not exactly sure how the article, then, qualifies as "Origins of English," but I'll help get it there by providing the derivations of some of the more interesting examples it contains.

Several of the words provided in the article are extremely rare, one of them appearing only twice in the written record, and by the same author (per the OED). However, some of the examples were at one time fairly well-known words which have simply crept into obsolescence. Still others may not have been used a great deal, but their derivations are interesting, nonetheless.

Take radicate. The earliest example of this word is adjectival, from around the first quarter of the 15th century, and it had already developed a figurative sense: "a quality or attribute that is deeply rooted." The verb form turns up about a century later, first recorded in 1531. It also had a figurative meaning. Today the verb is considered obsolete, while the adjective survives in botanical use, meaning "growing from a root (versus a rhizome)," and as such has come full circle back to its original meaning. It derives from Latin radix "root." The verb eradicate originally meant "pull up by the roots" (e means "out" in Latin) and is just a little bit younger than its radicate relatives, first turning up in 1564. Today eradicate has a broader sense of "to remove completely."

Fucus "coloring or make-up to beautify the skin" derives from Latin fucus "lichen." The Romans used a lichen (among other things) to create a red cosmetic that was applied as a rouge to the cheeks. The word fucus thus came to refer to the cosmetic itself, and that usage was picked up by English in the 17th century to refer to face make-up. Indeed the earliest reference in the OED, from 1607, is to a cosmetic to cover up freckles. The word doesn't seem to have survived in this sense much past the middle of the 18th century. However, it does survive today as the name of a genus of seaweed. One of these seaweeds, Fucus vesiculosus, also known as bladderwrack, was the first source of iodine (early 19th century) and was used to treat thyroid conditions. The bladder- element refers to the air-filled bladders on the fronds, while the -wrack element is not as easily explained - there are at least two different derivations of words spelled w-r-a-c-k. The OED doesn't identify which of these wracks is part of bladderwrack. However, a long-time source of excellent etymological information for us here at TOWFI, Michael Quinion, does touch upon it. He tells us that wrack is used to refer to several seaweeds, and it derives from Old English wrecan "to drive." The sense here is "driven by the tide."

Bombycinous "made of silk" does not appear to have been widely used in English. The OED gives only four examples of it, all occurring between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Silk is a much older word, and it is also much shorter! That may explain why bombycinous never caught on. It derives ultimately from Greek bombus "silk worm." The Greeks are thought to have borrowed the word from an oriental language. And though bombycinous may look quite ludicrous to us, it is, in fact, related to bombastic. How could this be? Well, bombast is a variant of bombace "cotton," deriving, via French, from Latin bombax "cotton," which in turn derives from Latin bombyx "silk." One word for clothing fiber came to be applied to another, perhaps visually similar fiber. So how did a word meaning "cotton" come to mean "inflated" and then, of language, "pompous"? Bombace "cotton" evolved into "cotton wool used as stuffing for clothes" and then the figurative senses of "stuffed," "over-padded" and "inflated" arose.
﻿﻿﻿﻿Silk, by the way, is a word that came from the Orient. The Germanic languages that have similar forms of this word appear to have gotten them from one of the Slavic languages of the Baltic Sea region. The Slavic and Germanic forms all share the letter l. However, the Latin and Greek forms have an r instead of an l (Latin for silk is sericum), and that form gave rise to the name that the Greeks bestowed upon the first silk traders - Seres. It is thought that the difference between the l-form and the r-form is the result of two slightly different source words.

Now, after all that, I hope you agree that we have helped justify the title of the article that inspired this blog entry!